Non Metallic Metals: An Introduction.

Howdy guys!

Now, my modeling experience comes from the world of Tabletop Miniatures Games. I've been playing and modeling, mostly modeling mind you, them since the 80s.

Non Metallic Metal as a technique didn't come about until the early 2000's from the competition painters of the era. What I would define Non-Metallic Metal as is the following: Using chromatic paints (yellows, reds, blues, etc) to paint what a metallic surface would look like within the environment the model exists in. Another technique in this realm is Object Source Lighting. I will get to this technique in a future post.



This article, is from a miniature artist named Darren Latham. He used to be a production artist ( He is now a miniature designer with them and now paints his own work.) with Games Workshop and used Non-Metallic Metals when he was there. Previously, the Games Workshop house style would be to use an actual metallic paint to represent metallic surfaces, this changed a while ago and they now use both techniques in their marketing materials.

That article goes over the technique and how it is applied. He also gives recipes for different metals in the article that corresponds to Games Workshops Citadel Acrylic paints.

This article goes over using Vallejo Acrylics to achieve similar results. In this article, he mentions the use of two mediums; Games Workshop's Lahmian Medium, and Vallejos Glaze Medium. We don't carry the Lahmian Medium but have carried the Glaze Medium from Vallejo for years. This stuff is magic! It takes what normally is an unblendable paint an allows you to work it for minutes (and sometimes hours depending on how you mix it up!) taking your standard acrylic paints and making them act like watercolors. That opens up a lot of airbrush-like techniques that would be very hard to achieve without the use of mediums added to acrylic paints.

I hope this serves as a good groundwork to build off of for you guys! If you have any questions, please shoot me an email HERE! You can always reach me at the shop, Walt's HobbyTown 2 Dwight Park Drive, Syracuse NY 13209.

I look forward to hearing from y'all!

-Mike